Goofed off this weekend and went shooting

I took off a few personal days and went to out local machine gun shoot. There will be a few posts about that over the next few days as soon as I get the videos sorted out. I had an opportunity to examine a serious failure. A friend of mine was shooting his 1919 browning and was using Turkish 8mm ammo. There was a failure to fire as had happen a number of times due to bad primers, except this time it was not a bad primer. What had happen was that there was a squib load and the bullet went a short distance down the barrel, just far enough for the next round to inter the chamber. So when the weapons was re-charged and fired a serious problem occurred.

If this had been a more expensive gun with no available spare parts I would have to try and fix this. However, spares are available.

We could not remove the case with a broken shell extractor as the neck was gone. The brass case also looked like it was brazed to the chamber wall.

I will be trying a chamber reamer this next week to see if I can salvage the barrel.

I was able to press the receiver sides back together and we were able to get the 1919 Browning back up and running while at the shoot.

The moral to this story is to keep away from Turkish ammo. Use it only in bolt guns or tear it down for components. If this accident had happen in a MG-42, MG-34 or one of the rarer guns the cost could have been enormous.